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Traversal: Twinkling

In a course of action quite out of character for the veteran RO, he brought up two more histograph views before turning to announce the result.

“Got a strange report from the ping, sir. Thousands of returns, small metallic objects – hard-edged, high-density. The system merged them into shapes to conserve target tracking resources.”

Harking thought for a moment. With the uncertainties involved, passive radar would certainly have taken a closely-spaced group of returns for one large object instead of many smaller ones.

Large numbers, low individual profile and a high metallic density. Large-scale distributed observation arrays tended to use such setups – they were popular for intelligence-gathering since each element in the array could be passively stealthy, achieving invisibility through a tiny cross-section area.

“We had any fliers come through recently?”

“No friendly intelligence units have passed through since at least three months ago. I don’t think this one is ours, sir.”

“That’s no coincidence.”

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